Campion on Bright Star

Campion on Bright Star

I sat down with New Zealand director Jane Campion at Cannes to talk about Bright Star a full sixteen years after I first met with her, for The Piano, for which she was the only woman to ever win the Palme d’Or in the 62 year history of the fest. Tragically, she lost the child she was carrying that year. Her daughter Ella was born three years later; spending time with her is the main reason Campion has made only four features since The Piano, and took four years off after In the Cut.

The gorgeously mounted 19th-century drama, told through the eyes of 18-year-old Fanny Brawne, is the true tale of Brawne‚Äôs romance with her 23-year-old North London neighbor, the poet John Keats. But their unconsummated two-year relationship was doomed by poverty and tuberculosis. “It was shockingly passionate and painful,” says Campion, who relied on Keats’s “extraordinary” love letters to Brawne. “It’s first love. They don’t have any restraint, because they’re just discovering themselves and their love at the same time.” The Keats Fanny met, says Campion, was “fun-loving, wicked, humorous and challenging.”